One can see and feel a place in a physical sense, but each place
also carries an "overload of possible meanings" and presents
an "assault on all ways of knowing" (Hayden, Dolores. 1995.
The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, MA:
MIT, 18). In The Idea of North, Peter Davidson provides just such a
perspective on place, as both tangible and deeply meaningful. However,
rather than focusing his analysis on any particular locale, this book
examines the concept of north itself from a variety of perspectives.
North is impossible to locate precisely, in part because its location
and meaning vary by culture and by individual. Instead it is presented
as "always a shifting idea, always relative, always going away from
us" (8). To the painter Eric Ravilious, north was Iceland and the
arctic regions of the world; to Ovid, north was Bulgaria; and to the
contemporary poet, Simon Armitage? Why, north is right 'here,'
in his home in West Yorkshire, England. North is seen as a direction, a
feeling, a place that is usually other than "here," that is
both real and imagined. For some, north may call to mind remoteness,
loneliness, desolation, exile, and melancholy. Yet, just as readily,
north may invoke adventure, savage and austere beauty, purity, freedom,
and the possibility of the unknown, all expanding outward to the distant
horizon. All of these ideas of north, and more, are culled from
Davidson's intensive, cross-cultural survey of art, literature,
film, myth, and personal experience. The end result is a fine work that
communicates the depth and range of meanings that have come to be
associated with this concept.

The main portion of the book is organized into three sections:
Histories, Imaginations of the North, and Topographies. Each of these
sections examines ideas of north as embodied in a particular set of
media or forms (although these overlap somewhat from chapter to chapter)
We are told that the materials selected for inclusion were considered to
be "particularly indicative or representative" (19) of each
category rather than comprehensive or randomly selected--an
understandable method given the scope of the work. Despite this
selectivity, the reader is indeed given a wide range of materials to
consider. The first section of the book provides "a history of
ideas of the north, from ... archaic Greece, through the medieval and
renaissance periods of speculation and cartography, to. the nineteenth
century" (19). The following section on "Imaginations of the
North" focuses more closely on the ways that ideas of north have
been captured and portrayed by artists, writers, and film-makers, while
the final section examines more specific topographies of the north
ranging from Canada, the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, China, and Japan.
Along the way, the reader is treated to analyses of materials of
striking diversity. We are presented, for instance, with Icelandic sagas
where dead spirits sing gustily in their open barrows, Sami tales about
wizards who sail across the seas on a bit of enchanted bone, works of
art that purposely exploit and confound the similarities between ice and
snow, the (post)industrial landscapes of Britain, and accounts of a dry
Japanese river bed which divides this world from the next, and where one
can here the sobbing of ghostly children. Despite this great diversity,
all of these materials express some concept of the north, and contain
many similar, if often competing, themes (e.g. north as the place of
death, north as a source of truth, etc.).

No work is without its faults of course. Two shortcomings in
particular detract from the overall contribution of the text: one
conceptual and one practical. First, Davidson offers no concise thesis.
The main theme seems to be that the idea of north moves people to
extremes. However, Davidson does not provide any more specific arguments
that could contribute to the scholarly effort to understand the
relationship between people and place. For instance, why is north a
powerful concept? Is it something intrinsic to the properties of a round
planet, shortages of daylight, and cold weather? Or does it have to do
with something inherent in the human condition, where areas and others
far removed are considered otherworldly or inhuman? The book seems to
imply both explanations without ever directly stating them. The second
shortcoming of the book is more practical: it lacks a bibliography and,
worse, an index. This makes it exceedingly difficult to consult the book
once one has finished reading it, a particularly vexing issue
considering the scope of sources detailed within it.

Despite these issues, The Idea of North is a powerful and
impressive piece of scholarship. The northern places included here range
from the "real" (e.g. Scandinavia), to the fictitious (e.g.
Nabokov's Zembla), to the mythological (e.g. the Hyperborea of the
Greeks). But since the north is both real and imagined, perhaps the
importance of distinguishing between real and unreal places is not so
great after all. As Yi-Fu Tuan (2001. Space and Place: The Perspective
of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.) reminds us in his
classic study of place, Europeans once firmly believed in the reality of
both a paradise on Earth and (of particular relevance to Davidson's
book) a Northwest Passage, despite repeatedly failed and often
disastrous efforts to find them. None of these failures dissuaded the
belief in these places, however, since "[s]uch places had to exist
because they were key elements in a complex system of belief" (Tuan
2001, 85-86). Thus, the idea of north is itself influential, is itself a
motivating principle of social and cultural significance, regardless of
whether that idea is coupled with an actual, physical location, and
regardless of whether any two people agree on any particular location as
northern in character. Davidson's work helps the reader appreciate
this reality for what it is.